Silver Bow Kiwanis Kiwanis Club Meeting, Dec 7, '10

We had several guests. Lee brought Stephanie from the Butte Public Library, Maggie brought Megan from the Circle K, and Keith brought Cameron from the Butte High Key Club. The Circle K is wrapping up their holiday Care Raffle ticket sales, the drawing is tomorrow. The Butte High Key Club has been doing a lot in the community, from two haunted houses, to over 1,000 pounds of candy for Operation Gratitude, to helping out with the food drive last weekend.

Space has been donated to the Library in the mall for a few months. fortunately damage to the collection was not extensive, only about 1% of the 70,000 items in the collection were damaged, and many of those are salvageable. However, the Library needs help getting the new space set up. They will be working on the space in the mall next week, December 13-17. Any help is appreciated. More information on this is available under Service Events.

Tim introduced Andy Larsen to talk about being an adult parole officer. There are about 500 "supervised felons" in the Butte community that report into Andy's office.Of the roughly 12,000 felons in the state of Montana, roughly 17% are incarcerated at any time. The remaining 83% are in the communities. Most criminals serve only 18 months of a sentence in prison, regardless of the crime or the sentence. Most petty thefts are contributed to drug use - the theft of a shovel and rake from a yard can be sold to purchase a small amount of drugs to get an addict their next fix.

The Montana prison and parole system is intended to be a reformative system (rather than punitive), but there is still a high rate of recidivism.

Another concern is that 40% of parolees have a mental illness, and with the Warmsprings hospital being closed, those people are harder to provide for properly. When Warmsprings closed there were 3,800 patients in the hospital.